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Congress reconvenes in January and will take up the Internet censorship
bills SOPA and PIPA again.
The House only deferred SOPA because of widespread public outcry.
Proponents of SOPA, funded by big corporate money,
are probably just hoping opponents will be distracted by the holidays.
Adam Savage reminds us why we need to be vigilant and keep
flooding Congress with calls to vote down those bills
or anything like them.

Right now Congress is considering two bills—the Protect IP Act,
and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)—that would be laughable
if they weren’t in fact real. Honestly, if a friend wrote these into a
piece of fiction about government oversight gone amok, I’d have to tell
them that they were too one-dimensional, too obviously anticonstitutional.

Make no mistake: These bills aren’t simply unconstitutional, they are
anticonstitutional. They would allow for the wholesale elimination of
entire websites, domain names, and chunks of the DNS (the underlying
structure of the whole Internet), based on nothing more than the “good
faith” assertion by a single party that the website is infringing on
a copyright of the complainant. The accused doesn’t even have to be
aware that the complaint has been made.

I’m not kidding.

He goes on to correctly compare SOPA and PIPA unfavorably
to the already bad Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998.
You remember, the DMCA that big copyright holders used to sue
pre-teen video and audio “pirates” and to take down websites on suspicion.
Savage cites a case where somebody with no copyright still got
YouTube vidoes taken down under DMCA.
Yes, SOPA and PIPA are even worse.

ISP meddling with net neutrality could unite indy musicians and record labels
against the duopoly:

For the music business, the failure of net neutrality presents several
big problems. Musicians are at the vanguard of digital distribution
of music files, video files, and other space-gobbling content. Traffic
throttling will almost certainly result in placing severe limitations on
the amount and kind of content musicians can put out there — and it’s
pretty likely that musicians will then be forced into partnering with
businesses that have fewer limits and greater access, no doubt for a fee,
to get their gear online. Another issue is that, as covered recently
in this column, we are seeing a whole new universe of music-related
business models, and we need to see some predictability in terms of
licensing methods and how artists and copyright owners get paid. One
of the most compelling proposals is that P2P music sharing should be
rendered commercially viable and copyright-legal by the imposition of
a blanket license that would be paid at the gate (i,e., through the
ISPs). Institutionalized throttling would take this plan out at the knees.

Another problem is that record labels, distributors and retail chains
who are already in desperate jeopardy can’t compete with ISPs and
cellular providers who, having launched their own music stores, have
all the incentive in the world to steer music consumers to their own
services rather than open the pipe for folks to shop elsewhere.

This observation comes from Canada, where current attempts by some
to pass legislation similar to the U.S. Digital Millenium Copyright Act
(DMCA) has suddenly gotten noticed as a path to
something music lovers have seen before:

McKie is referring to proposed changes modelled on the American
Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which call for a much
heavier-handed approach to interpreting what kind of content uses
are protected by copyright. At the same time a Canadian DMCA would
accord “safe harbour” status to service providers to shelter them
from a potential onslaught of copyright litigation provided they act
quickly to block infringing and illegal actions on their networks. A
Canadian DMCA could impact net neutrality by putting police power in
the hands of the networks, while providing ISPs with strong incentives
to prefer privately-negotiated content distribution deals over the
chaos of user-generated traffic. The bottom line is that musicians
have come to rely on the net as their number one go-to distribution
and marketing tool. The net got that way by being neutral to all
comers. Whether you were a platinum seller on Universal, or a couple
of unknown basement-dwellers, your video had an equal chance of going
viral. Without net neutrality, all the good pipe will get eaten up by
whoever has the power to make the deal. Which sounds a lot like the
payola days all over again.

Yep, that’s what we’ll get if we don’t have net neutrality:
payola for the duopoly.